How Do Household Tasks Shape Employment Contracts? The Provision of Care in Portugal

ABSTRACT

This study illustrates the complexities involved in outsourcing domestic work to the market. It draws on an original dataset of paid domestic workers in Portugal to examine how specific tasks interact with and explain contractual arrangements. A fuzzy cluster analysis categorizes paid domestic workers into caregivers and cleaners; however, a great degree of overlap implies that caring also entails cleaning tasks necessary for the care receiver’s well-being. A subsequent Tobit regression analysis shows that caregivers have more formal and stable contracts but earn lower wages and have longer working hours relative to cleaners. The study finds a segmentation of national origin and that some migrants are at a disadvantage in care work. The study also examines how employers deal with the idiosyncrasies of domestic work such as navigating trust-related issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Paid domestic work
• caregivers
• contractual arrangements
• fuzzy clustering
• Tobit regression

JEL Codes:

• J41
• J42
• J81

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the Associate Editor and the three anonymous referees for their comments, suggestions, and careful reading of the earlier versions of this manuscript. This research was possible thanks to data collection exercises within Domestic Work and Domestic Workers: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives project granted by FCT – Foundation of Science and Technology, of Ministry of Education and Science PTDC/JUR/65622/2006.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2018.1532594.

Notes

1 Portuguese governments have enacted programs since the early 1990s to regularize undocumented migrants, and, in 2007, a national migration policy was defined to regulate fluxes, promote legal migration and the integration of immigrants, and fight against irregular entries (Oliveira 2013).

2 Labor abuses include, notably, the nonpayment of wages, wages in arrears, underpayment of wages, excessive working hours, nonpayment of overtime, and breach of contractual agreements (Bakan and Stasiulis 1997).

3 It should be noted that these are quite general tasks involved in care work. We are aware that some more complex ones, which would help differentiate domestic workers and their working conditions, are missing and therefore limit the dataset.

4 We note that the linear effect is on the uncensored latent variable, not the observed outcome. Below, it is denoted $C^{\ast }\left(i\right)$.

5 However, our dataset is unable to discriminate active and passive care.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia: grant number UID/GES/00315/2013.

Notes on contributors

Fátima Suleman

Fátima Suleman is Professor at Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) and Senior Researcher at Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies (DINAMIA’CET), Lisbon, Portugal. She received her PhD in economics from ISCTE-IUL, Portugal and University of Bourgogne, France. Her research interests are related to wage and employment flexibility in the labor market. She has recently published in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, and The Manchester School.

Abdul Suleman

Abdul Suleman is Professor at Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) and Senior Researcher at Business Research Unit (BRU), Lisbon, Portugal. He received his PhD in quantitative methods from ISCTE-IUL, Portugal. His research interests focus on multivariate analysis statistical tools, especially fuzzy clustering. He has recently published in Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Pattern Recognition Letters, and Journal of Applied Statistics.